The decision of Manju Hegde, the former founder of Ageia and a former manager at Nvidia, to leave Nvidia for Advanced Micro Devices appeared to be rather a surprise for the high-technology community. However, Nvidia itself claims that replacements for the former exec have already been found within the company.

“Manju Hegde had spent his last year here working on CUDA marketing programs targeting the university audience. Those responsibilities have been taken over by CUDA general manager Sanford Russell, a long-time Nvidia executive, and his team. Another long-time Nvidia executive, Ashu Rege, has been responsible for PhysX engineering and development for the past 14 months [and will continue to do so],” said Ken Brown, a spokesman for Nvidia.

It is highly unlikely that Nvidia will feel significant impact of Mr. Hegde’s rather unexpected leave and the company’s CUDA and PhysX initiatives will progress in accordance with the previously set roadmaps.

Mr. Hegde joined AMD as the corporate vice president of Fusion Experience Program, under which he will work with software developers to promote AMD’s heterogeneous multi-core processors known as accelerated processing units (APUs). The main job of Mr. Hegde at AMD Fusion Experience Program (FEP) will be to ensure that software designers can release their applications that take advantage of Fusion processors (which combine x86 and graphics processing engines on a single piece of silicon) in conjunction with the appropriate chips. In particular, he will manage the developer relations teams that help independent software developers (ISVs) to implement program code optimized for heterogeneous multi-core microprocessors.

Tags: Nvidia, PhysX, CUDA, ATI, AMD, Fusion